Matt Priestley, of the Halo 2 Vista team, checks in this week to let us know what's going down in his department. In his second developer diary he touches on the team's progress, how H2V was received in Barcelona and how some Vista-specific features are shaping up
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Sorry to be tardy to the party. It's nice to hear about all of these cool features. I hope Halo 2 for Vista will feel identical to or very similarly to Halo PC. I personally like how I actually have time to register who hit me with what and from where, whereas if I play Unreal Tournament or any other fast-paced FPS, my inability to think and act quickly and smoothly causes me to die before my finger touches the W key to move. As for Blam Map Cache Files, the reason that they're so damn big is, as Zeph has stated, that a .map file is supposed to contain EVERY RESOURCE for a level. Halo XBox modders should know this. However, Halo 2 and Halo PC maps are a tad different. They use a couple of cache files that are shared for commonly used resources; in Halo PC/CE, you had bitmaps.map, sounds.map, and loc.map. When you add a default texture or sound, tool simply adds something to the map to tell the engine that X image/sound resides at Y offset in sounds/bitmaps.map. Model data, collision BSP data, and tag parameters are still added. Halo 2 Vista will more than likely act in the same way. External downloading is a pain in the ass, yes, but I like it because it doesn't throttle the game server you're playing for bandwidth, and it allows for private beta testing. AFAIK, I can't create a map and give it to just people I know in source modding. Any John Doe can connect to my server, and download my map. Ok, so my ranting at other users is done. I have a question now; I heard that Halo 2 Vista has ditched support for Level of Detail (LOD) models and bitmap mipmapping. Is this true? If that's the case, people without state-of-the-art systems might end up with negative framerates. :X